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Tribeca Film Festival

Photograph by Eileen Emond

One outstanding offering in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (April 24–May 5) is “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,” which reveals the secret greatness of a reclusive activist. A black female librarian fired from her job, around 1960, for being a Communist, Marion Metelits considered political injustices inseparable from media misrepresentations. She became a local TV producer and an on-air personality and married a wealthy white colleague named John Stokes, Jr. In the nineteen-seventies, when VCRs were first marketed, she bought many of them, and, until her death, in 2012, she fanatically recorded broadcasts, mainly news—seventy thousand cassettes’ worth—while living with her husband in deepening seclusion. (She also foresaw the importance of personal computing and collected Apple products from the start.) The director, Matt Wolf, relies on interviews with her family and her domestic staff, plus well-chosen samples of her recordings, to reconstruct her life and her ideas. An information revolutionary, Stokes, despite her decades of isolation, touched the nerve center of the times.